This video shows the winner of "Ukraine’s Got Talent", drawing a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric
to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about £75,000.

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman’s face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman
smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into
chaos from which a young woman’s face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image
turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man standing
outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine, resulted in one in four of the population being killed with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.

Due to feeling a bit under par the last few days I must
admit I am a tad late blogging on this, but I think the new installation by Columbian
artist Doris Salcedo at the Tate Modern is well worth a mention.

For those who have missed the news, it is a long crack in
the Turbine Room in the South Bank gallery. Inevitably most of the media coverage has been around how the crack has
got there, rather than what it means, which must be terribly frustrating for
the artist.

So here is a little about what it means with some help from
a produced leaflet.

The crack, which is 548ft long, is called Shibboleth. It is
a word that we find in the Old Testament of the Bible and relates to how the
Ephraimites were trying to cross undetected through the River Jordan when they
were caught by their sworn enemies the Gileadites, who forced them to say the word “shibboleth”.

Unfortunately, Ephraimites dialect did not include the sound
“sh”, so this allowed the Gileadites to identify and slaughter them. Brutal,
but effective, you could say.

The artist makes the point that “the
crack is a token of power: the power to judge and kill.” Whether you see the
crack as the River Jordan, which visitors seem to have most fun crossing over and
back again as the crack gets wider, is up to you to decide. Maybe the point is it shows the social divides in our world

Of course, the meaning is of little interest to most of the
media and is viewed more of a folly than a piece of art with anything worthwhile
to say. More column inches seem to have been given to theories of how the crack got
there.

It occurred to me while reading this article that it kind of depicts how we see life. We cannot accept the
“why” and until we know the “how”. And
we don’t really care about the “why”, because we think we feel satisfied with
the “how”. But, like a good whodunit,
once we know how it’s done we tend to lose interest and move on.

Words like Shibboleth are powerful things, as are action and
pictures. At theological college I remember a lecturer describing the Old
Testament as a great big picture book, because the different genres of literature stimulated multifarious images in the reader’s mind.

As a result, they got remembered and passed down from
generation to generation, but also made the heart search for spiritual truth.
When we reduce art or words to a rational, non-emotional experience, we are left with
just empty literalism. We remain hungry, but don’t know why? Somehow this head knowledge is supposed to satisfy us and fulfil the vacuum within. To my mind,It sadly doesn't.

Psst! By the way, if you want to know how the crack was done, it
was achieved by...Oops! Sorry, run out of space.